Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  The Israeli victory caused major Arab migrations, including those of tens of thousands of Jewish Arabs to Palestine. But the contrary migrations of Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian, were a flight, an expulsion. Hagar and Isma’il were in exile once again, but on a vast scale: after the 1948 war, there were 750,000 Palestinian refugees in the neighbouring lands and beyond. The mythical medieval figure of the Wandering Jew was replaced by the modern, and all too real, Wandering Palestinian.

  The Nakbah or ‘Disaster’ of 1948 is living, moving history, and will continue to be so as long as Palestinians are excluded from their homeland. As the Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh admits,

  We continue to be bewildered and wonder how it could have happened, why it happened, how it can be explained and understood. We can never have enough of it.

  Is it like the Holocaust to those Jews who were touched by it?

  If we include those for whom the touch is indirect, there could be few Jews, even at a distance of over seventy years, whom the Holocaust has not touched. Similarly, few Arabs have not shared the pain inflicted on Palestine. The State of Israel, as it now became, felt like a wound in the north of the Arabian subcontinent. On the map it is the shape of some ancient dagger, its hilt lying along the Mediterranean coast, its point striking the head of the Red Sea, its wedge-shaped blade driven between Egypt and the Levant. The wound was small, but it was deep. It has never healed, and as long as it does not, the pain will be felt.

  BEWARE THE AMERICANS BEARING GIFTS

  In the aftermath of the Second World War, the old European empires had begun to go the way of Nineveh and Tyre. The British had handed back India, hacked bloodily in two with Partition; now they divested themselves of the mess of a divided Palestine. Elsewhere in the Arab world, they had already granted Iraq formal independence in 1930, but thanks to its reasonably tame Hashimite king had kept effective control of the country’s foreign policy and also retained some useful air bases. The French, meanwhile, had withdrawn from Syria and Lebanon by the end of 1945, but still clung on to their North African possessions.

  In Egypt, where the client-king Faruq reigned, British forces were withdrawn after 1945; but not from the Canal Zone, on which Britain exerted a military stranglehold. This continued presence rankled with many in the Egyptian army, and in particular with the middle-ranking officers drawn from the ‘yeomanry’ – men who felt an allegiance to the physical land of Egypt which the urban upper classes did not necessarily share. The Disaster of 1948 had further fuelled the officers’ anger at the ineptitude and corruption of the king and the ruling Wafd party. Discontent was also simmering among the urban poor, and in January 1952 it boiled over in riots in which British and other foreigners in Cairo were attacked and their property torched. The army were called in to contain the mayhem. That they did so swiftly and efficiently only increased the self-confidence of the anti-regime officers: under their command, they had an effective tool for political action – and for rule. On the night of 22–23 July 1952, the Free Officers, as they called themselves, moved on the royal palace. Faruq was deposed and shipped out on El Mahrousa – the royal yacht that, more than eighty years before, had led the way along the new Suez Canal. To pull the punch of the coup, the king’s baby son was elevated to the throne in absentia, with the junta’s elder frontman General Neguib as his prime minister; a year later, the royal fiction was abandoned and Egypt became a republic with Neguib as president. In the fashion of The Thousand and One Nights, however, the fiction contained another fiction: there was yet another power behind the republican throne, smiling over the general’s shoulder.

  There was also a new generation of world empires in the wings, and it was not long before an envoy came from one of them. In May 1953 US Secretary of State Dulles arrived in Cairo bearing a gift from General Eisenhower to General Neguib – a nickel-plated Colt revolver engraved with a presentation inscription. If it had a meaning, a Colt in the Cold War could hardly but be loaded with a double entendre: defend American interests, or do the honourable thing. But when Dulles went on to meet the prime mover of the revolution and the real power in the land, Colonel Jamal Abd al-Nasir, there were no hidden meanings. Nasser, as he became known in the non-Arabic world, wanted bigger guns, and tanks and warplanes. Of course the Americans would supply them, Dulles told him – provided Egypt joined a defence pact with the US and UK against the USSR, and agreed to guarantee the British presence in the Canal Zone. For Nasser and the revolution, that would indeed have been political suicide; he refused the deal, point-blank. Instead, Egypt turned to the Eastern bloc and got its arms, no strings attached, from the Soviets. The Americans retorted with an offer of funding for the Aswan High Dam, the revolution’s ambitious but exorbitantly costly project to supply Egypt with dependable irrigation and industrial power. But there was another condition: stop buying Soviet arms.

  The old European powers might have begun to bow, reluctantly, out of the region. But Egypt and its Arab neighbours were still up on their same rock, and new empires had already stepped into the old power game, supporting and opposing, dangling loans and arms, then snatching them away. Was it better to be a US puppet or a Soviet Pinocchio? Choosing between Eastern and Western blocs would always be a gamble, Russian roulette with an American revolver.

  And so it would go on, the most outspoken Arab poet of the age knew, as long as

  we are still those shattered, scattered tribes

  That feed on buried malice and blood-feuds

  . . .

  For in the east is Hulagu, and in the west is Caesar.

  It is poetic licence to concertina chronology and call the two twentieth-century Cold Warriors by the names of a thirteenth-century Mongol and a first-century BC Roman. But that is the point. Time can be an hourglass; but it is also a squeezebox, and one that plays variations on very old themes.

  THE MUSLIN CURTAIN

  Those lines of Nizar Qabbani just quoted come from a birthday ode addressed to Nasser in 1971. The ode was an elegy, not a celebration, for by that time the poet’s ‘Knight of Dreams’ was dead; disappointment had killed the dreams and the man, well before his grand climacteric. But, like some secular Hidden Imam, the deceased leader whose followers believe him to be merely in a state of miraculous concealment, something of him seemed to survive the dissolution of the body. Was it just the smile? (Nasser’s smiling, front-page face is my own earliest memory of Arab history.)

  It was the smile of a Cheshire Cat, but also of a matinée idol. Nasser, who had planned and headed the coup of 1952, could not bear to be anything other than the male lead. In March 1954, at the age of thirty-six, he had removed General Neguib from office, put him under house arrest and assumed the presidency himself. That, however, was only a start. Exactly when Nasser began to see himself as the leader not just of Egypt but of all Arabdom is not clear. It has been said that, before 1956, he ‘never spoke of himself as anything but Egyptian’. But the idea of a bigger role was probably there from the beginning, for he said in a broadcast only three months after taking power that ‘The aim of the Revolution Government is for the Arabs to become one Nation with all its sons collaborating for the common welfare’. For the time being, however, he was too busy at home to pursue that wider aim – busy using his charm to disarm his own people (they had liked the fatherly General Neguib), arming himself against the Israelis, looking for finance for the Aswan Dam, and mucking out the Augean stable of corruption that was Cairo. What would change everything, giving Nasser an intercontinental audience and inspiring him to gather the word of Arabs everywhere, was Suez.

  In July 1956 the Americans, true to their threat, withdrew the offer of funding for the Aswan Dam. A week later Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company, on the grounds that its takings would go towards making up the shortfall of $200 million for the dam. At this, Britain, France and Israel got together and did a secret deal. As a result, in October the Israelis advanced on the Canal. Egyptian forces, as expected, moved into the
Canal Zone to oppose them. Now Britain and France – in their role as joint shareholders of the Canal Company – warned both sides to pull out. As the plan had assumed, the Egyptians dug in. At this point the French and British sent in their own forces, which attacked and occupied parts of the Canal Zone. So far so Machiavellian. And it was all more than faintly reminiscent of the successful operation of 1882, when a joint Anglo-French naval squadron had descended on Egypt during the Urabi revolution and Britain had ended up taking the country over. But that was when they were the superpowers. Now, seventy years on, there was a contingency that their plan – a combination of gunboat imperialism, gung-ho adventure and gangster heist – had overlooked: the possibility that the new superpowers might not take kindly to their predecessors meddling in the Middle East. For the region, whatever else it had been called, was and always had been in the middle; Arabs were still middle-men, as they were when they mediated between the two spheres of Old World trade, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Now, in the 1950s, the Arab lands were no less central, no less sensitive – particularly as no Iron Curtain divided them but only a diaphanous veil, a shifting muslin curtain between the eastern and western wings of the Cold War world. And so the superpowers entered the fray. The USSR threatened to march in militarily on the Egyptian side; the USA threatened to sell off its British currency bonds and destroy the UK economy in a meltdown of the pound sterling. The Suez escapade was abandoned: the British bulldog slunk off, tail between legs; the Gallic cockerel crowed its crestfallen last. The Israelis stayed on to fight another day, but having placed themselves in the middle of the middle they had no choice.

  For France and Britain it was a disaster. The British prime minister fell, his French counterpart teetered; national souls were searched. And their action, doomed as it was, produced another reaction, the old habitual reflex of Arabs uniting under pressure. The Suez Canal joined the Med to the Red; the Suez Crisis would join Arabs from the Atlantic to the Gulf.

  A TRANSISTORIZED ORGASM

  If Suez was the death-rattle of those two moribund powers, among Arabs it set off a frisson of surprise mixed with what Arabic calls shamatah, and English – which coyly professes not to know the feeling – calls by the borrowed name of Schadenfreude. An eye-witness in Britain’s last Arab possession, the journalist David Holden, put it in plainer terms: ‘the thrill of an Arab victory ran like an orgasm through the back streets of Aden.’ It was Nasser who brought on the climax. Although it was actually superpower pressure that had defeated the aggressors of Suez, he worked up the defeat into his own triumph. As an experienced officer who had inspired and led a coup, he already had a way with words. He now also took upon himself the mantle of a long rhetorical tradition. Ancient Arabs had been led by charismatic kahins, poets and prophets. Now they had a charismatic Egyptian president who, with his rhetorical spin on Suez, was creating a powerful new ’asabiyyah, a wheel of fire much wider than Egypt – and he was doing so with the help of another element, air.

  Print had prepared the ground for a new Arab unity. Print, however, was earthbound and could be contained. In their rebellious North African possessions, the French had put a strict ban on Egyptian magazines, with their dangerously alluring pictures of Nasser’s soldiers

  demonstrating to students the technique of throwing hand grenades . . . marching through the magnificent streets of Cairo in their khaki shorts. Everyone looked happy and healthy; the women and girls waved from the windows of the apartment houses.

  But you couldn’t ban the oxygen of the airwaves. Moreover, 1954, when Nasser became president, was exactly when the small but powerful offspring of the old valve wireless set, the transistor radio, was first produced commercially; 1956, the year of Suez, was when it became widely and cheaply available. Under the colonial nose from the Interzone of Tangier to the Free Zone of Aden, these small but insistent organs of disembodied speech insinuated themselves into the Arabic world, and spoke in Nasser’s voice. Yet again, a new development in communications was unlocking a new phase of Arab history: the growth of the unifying high language, the writing of the Qur’an, Umayyad book-keeping, Abbasid paper-making, nineteenth-century printing, and now the twentieth-century transistor – all opened chapters in the long Arab story.

  Cairo’s radio transmitting power rose from 73 kilowatts at the time of the 1952 revolution to nearly 6,000 kilowatts in 1966. At its height, Egypt was broadcasting 589 hours of radio a week, not far short of the BBC’s 663 hours at the same time. By then, broadcasts included many in non-Arabic languages, especially African ones; Nasser’s mission was gaining new dimensions. But Arabic was always the focus. In the Nasserist view – as also for the Arab League, the Arab Awakening, and in the ancient division of humanity into ’arab and ’ajam – an Arab was defined above all by language. And the great thing about radio waves was that they respected no other definitions: they vaulted sectarian dividing-lines and imperial lines on the map, and united the linguistic homeland.

  Radio broadcasting revived the ancient power of spoken Arabic, and gathered the Arab word on a huge scale; as a call to unity, it was comparable to the slogans of early Islam. It was the ideal medium: listeners couldn’t answer back; they could always switch off, but the message was too novel, too exciting, and it was right there in your house, in your stall in the suq. Nasser’s audience would number millions, but he had an enviable knack – not so much the common touch as the individual reach. Add to this, genuine heroic cool: on 26 October 1954 a bungling would-be assassin from the Muslim Brotherhood fired eight shots at Nasser while he was making a speech. They all missed; but where many a president would be bundled off, Nasser stood his ground, paused briefly, then ad-libbed:

  I will live for your sake and die for the sake of your freedom and honor. Let them kill me; it does not concern me so long as I have instilled pride, honor, and freedom in you. If Jamal Abd al-Nasir should die, each of you shall be Jamal Abd al-Nasir!

  It was pan-Arab, populist, but intensely personal. And it came direct from the man himself. Combining good looks, bedroom eyes, a mellifluous tongue and a magical message, he was the ultimate political crooner. Men hero-worshipped, women swooned. The word had regained its ancient sorcery; almost its divinity. In his posthumous birthday ode to his ‘Knight of Dreams’, Nizar Qabbani spoke on behalf of the man in the pan-Arab suq of the one

  on whose love we were drunk, like a Sufi drunk on God . . .

  It is all but blasphemous, and that is the point.

  Love pumped out over the airwaves at ever increasing kilowattages. Across the independent Arabic world, leaders upgraded their own transmission power. Would-be leaders, too, recognized the supreme importance of broadcasting. From now on, one of the first calls in any coup, like the one that overthrew the monarchy in Iraq in 1958, would be ‘Seize the radio station!’ In societies in which facts are subservient to human or divine authority, to have control of rhetorical truth was even more important than controlling the palace.

  In time, the strategic weapon of choice for coup-mongers would be the satellite TV channel. But even in Nasser’s era there was a visual side to his message, for Arab – which at the time meant, effectively, Egyptian – cinema began to flourish. However, as well as ideas of pan-Arab unity, Egyptian movies disseminated images of multiplicity. Arabs began to see other aspects of themselves – not just reasonably recognizable robed fellaheen in bucolic settings, but also women in perms and cocktail dresses, living in gemütlich Cairene interiors. In addition, they heard en masse for the first time just how differently their Egyptian cousins spoke in real life. When one reflects that the expression for ‘No’ in the San’ani dialect that I speak is mashi, and that mashi in Cairene dialect means ‘OK, yes’, one will realize that the potential for misunderstanding is high.

  BECOMING ARAB

  Nasser himself would exploit Arabic’s slippery diglossia. In his speeches for Egyptian consumption, he would begin and end in high Arabic, but would switch between one and the other in the middle
. These linguistic gear-changes were a way of making points about ‘local [Egyptian] nationalism versus pan-Arabism’. In his speeches to the wider Arabic world, however, he would use the high language alone. And if one high theme ran through nearly all of them, it was that of the threat of imperialism, and the need for Arabs to achieve unity in order to confront it. A full 2,500 years after Assyria and Babylon, other peoples’ empires were still lions on the prowl. But now the rock of ’urubah, arabness, was firmly planted in Egypt. Nasser was playing, consummately, the part of the lion-tamer, and himself being lionized by the Non-Aligned Movement. To the blocs that formed this movement he was now adding another – a pan-Arab world with Egypt and himself at its centre.

  Not everyone was happy with Egypt being the great Arab monolith, and some of the dissenters were themselves Egyptian. Taha Husayn had questioned the authenticity of ancient poetry, and had championed the diversity of Egypt’s heritage; but he had always celebrated high Arabic, and as one of its great modern stylists had confirmed Egypt’s place at the heart of modern Arabic letters. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, there appeared a number of extreme dissidents like the Egyptian-nationalist enfant terrible Luwis Awad. A Copt, a Cambridge man and a natural stirrer, he launched in his book Plutoland a virulent attack on the ‘occupation’ of Egypt by Arabs and Arabic. The attitude was reminiscent of the Shu’ubi literary attacks against Arabs in the heyday of their empire; as then, Awad’s polemic provoked vicious counter-attacks. He was branded, for example, a ‘wicked charlatan, impostor, transgressor, puppet, trash, insane, odious, rotten, depraved, useless thing, missionary errand boy . . . ’ A few neo-Shu’ubis, like Awad’s fellow Copt Salamah Musa, were for cutting out the unifying high Arabic tongue altogether. Musa argued that Egyptians should write in Egyptian dialect, not in the pan-Arab high language – and yet he preached but did not practise, for he himself wrote in that same high Arabic. Given such intellectual hemlock-drinking, and the number of poison pens wielded by the defenders of Arab culture, Egypt’s ’urubah won.